This review is also posted at Goodreads. After I wrote it, I thought of James Howard Kunstler's A World Made by Hand, which has a more nuanced and less binary portrayal of the varieties of human experience after society breaks down.

*****

I don't usually review books that have been reviewed to death. Better to
find a worthy, unseen work and lift it up. But I'm making an exception
for Peter Heller's The Dog Stars because I haven't seen a review yet that tapped into the thread it opened up for me.

Like
Heller's main character Hig, flying over a flu-wasted Colorado looking
for someone to connect with, I tried to find a review that spoke to this
passage:

Still we are divided, there are cracks in the
union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask
later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute
longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do.
What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are
negotiating with your own death.

The reviews I've read are
enamored with the Mad Max/The Road comparisons with the novel's hopeful
endcap to the apocalypse. Or distracted by syntax. Fragments. No
punctuation. Sex wands exploding. (Well, Hig hadn't had sex for nine
years, so perhaps its rediscovery might be like a Harlequin Romance, but
I digress.)

Don't get me wrong. The Dog Stars is a read-it-in-one-or-two-sittings novel, but unlike Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
this one never brought me to tears. Instead, it made me wonder: Why are
so many readers responding to its "hopefulness" or its poetic treatment
of a world in both decline and regeneration instead of to the
assumption that, even for the sensitive and "weak" HIg, there were so
many Others who could simply be blown away because... well, because they
weren't Hig.

At another point, Hig says: "The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice."

Desperate
souls whose survival was foiled by HIg and his pal Bangley might be
forgiven for thinking the same of the sensitive aviator-poet. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he ain't.

Most of the other humans portrayed in the
story are ciphers or caricatures worthy of one of those shooting arcade
games the NRA fears is eroding our values. They threaten, they die. A
little or a lot. But prove themselves human? Not a chance.

This
is a serious book by a serious writer, and Heller has clearly posed this
divide between two world views that are severely tested by the
apocalypse. But there isn't much follow through, and there's even less
by the admirers of the book.

I'm wondering if Heller is trying to
make a commentary on how we are living today—not about the future or
some idealized humanity.

Hig's partner Bangley and another
character he meets after he takes his fool's flight west are both
ex-special forces, hardened men who do not make the fine distinctions
that will get Hig killed. In fact, they are portrayed as the soldiers
and Navy Seals protecting us today, projected into a dystopian future.

Although
America has not been wiped out by a virus, we are protected by similar
men and similar values today. We have the luxury of our poetry and
hammock sex and contemplative fly fishing because the Bangleys of the
world have our backs.

In the real world, that is certainly the
view of the Bangleys. The Higs of us who "believe in the possibility of
connectedness" would not survive without the ruthlessness and killing
skills of hard men.

Because Hig finds love and there is new
greenery sprouting in the killed forests, we are encouraged to believe
there is hope. That the apocalypse isn't so bad. That the end isn't the
end.

Arabs, of all people, appear to be patrolling American
skies. Is that an ironic footnote or a reminder that we have so much
capacity to be wrong about Others?

It's not Heller's job to spell it out for us. And thank goodness, in his restraint, he didn't. But what about us readers?

I'm delighted to announce that Monument Road has just been selected as one of 10 adult fiction titles in the American Booksellers Association’s fall Celebrate Debut Authors with Indiespromotion. (The program has since been renamed Indies Introduce... and the book got top billing in this Shelf Awareness article previewing fall debut fiction.)

The moment I come through the preschool door each week, Raeesha is there. Read to me, she says.

Today we read Rumplestiltskin, a book about a frog and the seasons, a book about occupations, a book about guinea pigs and another about sharks. There is a counting book, too, Elmo Walks the Dog, the Hungry Little Caterpillar and perhaps another I've forgotten. For some of these, another child sits in, but she's there for the duration.

We sit on a small blue padded bench that if it were scaled to adult size would be a love seat. She sits on my lap and turns the pages (the Elmo book has pages within the pages, and she turns them on cue).

I've seen an evaluation form that shows her as developmentally delayed. She's five, perhaps the oldest in the class, and that may be true, but she certainly is interested in the right things.

When we go out to the playground, she is the first to cry, Give me a ride on your shoulders for three minutes, and I do. When she asks for another, I tell her she has to wait her turn, and she does.

She'll take these opportunities sometimes to kiss me. I tell her, We don't kiss in school, and then I remember the first time I got in trouble in school was for kissing a girl when I was five.

I have some friends whose granddaughter is already reading at age five. I wonder if Raeesha would be reading by now if she had the other girl's family and wasn't living in a shelter.

It's not a question that's answerable or a situation that is changeable—at least not in the magic wand sort of way it happens in the children's books.

Instead, we work on counting and pattern recognition, colors, concepts, loving books, asking nicely, waiting our turn. By next fall, Raeesha will be in kindergarten, perhaps with kids who can already read and write.

I haven't yet read All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, which gives a detailed review of the fingerprints all over the subprime-driven meltdown, but I have noticed a tempest going on over at Amazon related to the book.

When the authors appeared on The Daily Show and in other media to promote the book's launch, readers went to Amazon.com to buy it.

Kindle readers were shocked to find the eBook edition priced almost the same as the hardcover.

Readers argue that a digital-rights-managed edition should be priced substantially lower than the discounted hardcover price of $17.50. The e-readers seem to expect a price point of $9.99.

When I checked the site to grab these links, I noticed the Kindle price had dropped to $14.99, still closer to the hardcover price than to the $9.99 magic number.

Is this Amazon and the publisher simply trying demand pricing during the media blitz, intending all along to drop it? Or did they price it higher thinking the audience (techno-driven financial types?) would not resist the higher price point?

More than one commenter noted the irony of a book about financial misdeeds carrying a higher price.

Whatever was behind the pricing decision, the authors have to be peeved that their Amazon rating has been downgraded by something outside their control. And future authors could also see the same thing befall them until the market settles the question for everyone.

In Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne's folding bicycle ramble through world music, culture and urban design, Byrne agrees with Jared Diamond's claim that

people develop cultural affinities for certain foods, ways of getting around, clothes and habits of being that become so ingrained that they will, in his telling, persist in maintaining their habits even to the point of driving themselves and sometimes their whole civilization to extinction. He gives a lot of historical evidence — for example an eleventh-century Norse settlement in Greenland where the settlers persisted in farming cattle, as impractical as it was there. The cuisine or habits of the local Inuit were never adopted or adapted — their diet and ways were just not culturally acceptable — and eventually the settlers all died. This was not a quick settlement, either — it lasted for over four hundred years — long enough for them to convince themselves that they were doing okay.

Diet may not be what kills America, but it's in the running.

The New York Times reports that chicken wings are commanding a higher price per pound than skinless, boneless chicken breasts, prompting restaurants and bars to switch to "boneless chicken wings." The movement is not because, in the words of Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler Buffalo wings are "fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt" and the ersatz wings are marginally more healthy.

The recession is the cause of the price flip-flop.

Restaurants,
normally big buyers of breast meat, slashed orders as millions of
people cut back on eating out, and breast prices slumped. But demand
for wings has remained strong, partly because people perceived them as
a cheap luxury.

A serving of 12 Buffalo Wild Wings Chicken Wings contains 600 calories and provides 62% of your daily recommended fat intake, 120% of cholesterol and 150% of sodium! Adding the Blazin'\u2122 Sauce gives 30 more calories and bumps up the grams of fat by 20%. A serving (8) of their boneless wings has 500 calories, one-fourth the fat and no sodium — but also less of that fat and salt-lover's flavor.

While most restaurants are still coy about the nutritional content of their offerings, there are abundant online tools that unmask the cheap and dangerous menu items. The Livestrong.com site linked above is pretty good. It suggests better alternatives and allows you to track what you've eaten.

The PB&C is intended to denote peanut
butter and chocolate, but the more accurate translation might be
potbellies and cardiovascular disease. After all, this one drink does
pack more calories than a dozen ice cream sandwiches and more saturated
fat than nearly 20 large orders of McDonald's French fries.

I attended a marathon training camp years ago, where one of the Pike's Peak runners said he trained on that many calories per day. Today, nutritionists estimate sweetened beverages now account for almost 25 percent of daily calories in young adults in America, including things like the Worst Holiday Coffee Drink:

Between the candies and the casseroles, we
already have plenty of temptations to deal with during the holidays. We
certainly don't need Starbucks' surreptitious sugar overload thrown
into the mix. The name implies indulgence, sure, but the fact that this
cup holds more sugar than 9 Krispy Kreme doughnuts is pretty appalling.
Settle for a candy cane in your coffee or find a different drink.

Congress ... in 1924 enacted the Johnson-Reed bill that limited European immigration to just over 150,000 per year with nationality quotas based on the origins of the U.S. population, which heavily favored western and northern Europe, especially Britain. The act required entry visas, with photographs -- another facet of control -- and largely excluded Asians. It exempted most of the western hemisphere so that Mexico could continue supplying western farmers with cheap labor.

From MinnPost, a story on Minnesota's "best and brightest" video bloggers includes Melinda Jacobs, whose other stabs at sincerity, authenticity and
attention-grabbing included promoting herself as a flirting expert. She got her start in March after devoting:

two years studying the economics and technology of the
industry before jumping into the digital era to do long-form celebrity
interviews.

Even though she hopes to eventually make a living with online video,
she refuses to put ads or product placements into her pieces if she
doesn't believe in them.

The Craig Show, also featured, does product placement right, with a Taylor guitar slipped into his golf instruction video. (Maybe he's only hilarious if you play golf.)

And in this, via The Daily Glean, Michele Bachmann proves herself a much better Autotune singer than Sarah Palin.

I'd rather not be this unkind,But Trillin put me in this bind.I heard him, just, on NPR —His iambs stretched a smidge too far.

Though some reviews have praised the man,They surely could do better thanPoor imitations so bereft
Of supple meter, rhyme and heft.

From Anchor Books to ZondervanBook publishing's run out its span, So why consign a single treeTo reproduce such minstrelsyAs this? It's hackneyed, drear and trite,And Trillin barely can recite.His verse rolls weakly off his tongue —Not rapped, nor slammed nor even sung.

Jon Stewart tittered at this drivel.Would Northrup Frye have been so civil?New Yorker, Nation, what are those?Just places where they still spell proseComplete with vowels and don't use thumbsTo type whatever nonsense comes.

So where's the market that demands(In dollars, yen or Kruggerands)Such arch flirtation with clicheThat no one's asked for anyway?

The fundamental impulse that sets
and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new
consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation,
the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that
capitalist enterprise creates.— Joseph Schumpeter, Creative destruction

Sunday afternoon, like many other Borders Books sometime customers, I received an emailed sale coupon. After this desperately discounted Christmas retailing season, 40% off everything didn't seem like much of a deal. Since they were a closing a store, shouldn't the bargains be even greater?

It didn't matter, since the fine print noted the store they were closing was in Sacramento. Turns out this was not an invitation to jump on a plane or click through to the website.

It was just a mistake by another company circling the drain as its entire industry restructures into oblivion.

If moving from browsing dusty and incomplete local stores to zipping through seemingly limitless virtual storehouses was the extent of the change to the book business, I'd still be saddened, but could appreciate the trade offs of more titles for less immediacy, of lower cost for a different shopping experience.

Thirty-odd years ago, I had a small business selling used books out
of the house via the national network of sellers that subscribed to
Antiquarian Bookman. The weekly publication listed books customers were
seeking. Shops and independent book scouts like me scoured the fine
print for titles we had for sale. We'd scribble our price on a post
card along with a shorthand description of the edition and its
condition. Weeks later, we might make a sale, which we would package
and send to the retailer.

Today, that process is nearly
instantaneous and includes not just the book specialists who know what
they are selling, but amateurs who just want to clean out their
shelves.

I'm not sure winding the book business down to zero is precisely what Schumpeter had in mind when he said:

But in capitalist
reality as distinguished from its textbook picture [what counts is] the competition from
the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply,
the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control
for instance) – competition which commands a decisive cost or
quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the
profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations
and their very lives. This kind of competition is as much more
effective than the other as a bombardment is in comparison with
forcing a door...

"This is the future of book reading. It will be everywhere," says Michael Lewis. And maybe he's right; the e-book reader (really a personal Amazon purchase kiosk) might be everywhere.

But what about the books?

As David Streitfeld wrote, more is changing than the way of buying books or what what physical form they take. Creative destruction is moving upstream to the publishers and closer to the creators. It's getting harder to make money from the original creative product.

Streitfeld finds online dozens of copies of a newly published paperback he's seeking available for as little as one cent, plus shipping.

How much do I want to pay,
and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a
bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?

In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.

He buys a hardcover edition for 25 cents.

Jon Pareles describes how the process has evolved in pop music, where the destruction of local record stores
is only the tip of a melting ice berg. Songs and entire albums are being produced with
licensing, not listeners, in mind, because that's where the revenue is.

Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be
appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now that
free copies multiply across the Web.

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook
friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical
solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt,
Web-site pop-up ads or a brand.

Everything is free now,
That's what they say.
Everything I ever done,
Gotta give it away.
Someone hit the big score.
They figured it out,
That we're gonna do it anyway,
Even if doesn't pay.

But writing a book for free is still a very different decision than recording a song or putting up this post — even a thousand more in a year. Investigating a corrupt administration involves a different commitment than opining about someone else's reporting.

This lament is not new, and for now the amazing access we have to a still-unfolding proliferation of content makes it seem consumers have made the better bargain. The creators can play or be destroyed.

But perhaps we, too, are being creatively destroyed, little by little.

Consuming an entire book may soon seem as archaic as sitting still for the recitation of an epic poem or memorizing the catechism.